A Day in the Life
I started my day with a long email to a writer whose book I’ve just edited, telling her three different ways (instead of just no) that she should not under any circumstances rewrite the whole 440 pages in present tense. I told her that was the demon in her head making sure that she never finished this book.
Then I emailed another author who may or may not want to work with me as an editor. I didn’t try to sell, just explained at length and offered to read a sample for free.
I drafted a copyright page for a book I’ll publish soon, then drafted a short-short bio of the author, a second less short bio, and the synopsis for the back cover. I posted those for him to review.
I ate lunch and played Spelling Bee for a little while. Then I buckled down to work on a chapter in the novel I’m writing.
I interrupted myself to call my dentist’s office because my new crown was acting up. I was interrupted again when the beach rental manager I’ve been trying to reach for two weeks called me back. The cottage we hoped to rent for a week in June isn’t available. The rental person will try to find something comparable.
Back to my chapter. I need to get three characters together and I do. One of them makes tea, because it’s her house and she was taught good manners. But they may never get to drink that tea because the reason they need to be together is fraught. Will readers mind if the tea gets cold? And how do the characters move from chitchat to business? Does it take too long? Is it too much Miss Marple?
I don’t know how other writers do, but when I write, I have to have harmless little distractions close at hand. That’s why I love to write on my laptop. Click, I’m trying to reach Genius in Spelling Bee. Click, I can look for a new way to cook shrimp for supper, even though I’m sure it’ll be shrimp and grits again. Click, I’m back to my chapter. During the shrimp interlude, a line of dialogue came to me, something a character could say to provide the pinpoint on which the turn can be made. Credit the distraction.
Even with a crazy-quilt day and my hopscotch approach, I’d gotten 880 words down, so I felt pretty good. I decided to be done for the day, to come back to proofread the chapter in the morning.
Then, as I raised my eyes from the keyboard, an odd thing happened. I visualized a backward 3, the numeral 3, but backwards. I saw it much the way I had heard that line of dialogue I needed for my chapter. But that wasn’t the oddest thing. In that moment, perhaps because I was taken by surprise, I couldn’t remember which way a 3 should go. Was it backwards? Does a 3’s fat backside go against the right-hand wall or the left-hand wall? I looked at my keyboard to reassure myself. Yes, that 3 I saw was backwards. Like this, Ɛ.
I thought I should find out—what does a backwards 3 mean? Click. I searched, “What does backwards 3 mean?” It means something in mathematics, apparently. I am sure I’m not hallucinating mathematical anything. It’s the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet. Same.
I didn’t find any dirty meanings and that was a relief. I’d rather not start having random visualizations of a suspect kind.
Next, I searched “how to make backwards 3 on keyboard” so I could type one in this essay. The internet told me how to do it, then reminded me the backwards 3 is half of this: Ɛ˃. The little sideways heart we made do with before emojis put these at our fingertips, ❤️.
If I hadn’t cut my vision short, would the little sideways dunce cap have materialized to form the symbol for love? We will never know. I’ll be fine ending my typically quiet and typically backwards and sideways day with gratitude for sentences, however they come, and little signs of love, however they come.
Molecular Reading: 2020
I read fiction because I believe storytelling is what connects us to other human beings and in fact, is what makes us human. A friend of mine says reading rearranges her molecules.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to read mysteries in all their forms, cozies, psychological suspense, courtroom dramas, police procedurals, noir. I like hardboiled private eyes and naïve amateur detectives. They work alone, or in pairs, sometimes oddly matched. I tend to favor women writers, but read plenty of men writers, too.
Sense of place is strong in mysteries. The location often plays a role in the story. London, the Shetland Islands, Los Angeles, Harlem, Wyoming, Occupied Paris, the Navaho tribal lands, the night markets of Taipei—all are made so real to me, I could walk the streets or ride the ranges. I should create a mystery readers’ map and stick pins in all the places I’ve traveled to in these books.
A strong sense of time is also essential—Medieval Europe, Victorian England, the eras of both World Wars, the Cold War, every decade of the Twentieth Century. I’ll add an overlay of time travel to my map. Certain stories could only happen in a specific place, at a specific time.
But a reader can travel vicariously through space and time without a single drop of blood being shed. No serial killers in Jane Austen. So what compels us mystery readers—otherwise sweet-natured and civilized—to pursue murder and mayhem?
Even though these books go to the dark side of human nature, they tend to end with the world, or some small part of it, set to rights. Someone does something bad. Someone else moves heaven and earth to sort them out, and a form of justice prevails. We are left sadder, maybe heartbroken, but with some wisdom gained through the experience, and with a sense that there is order after all. We are redeemed.
For myself, when I put it all together, I am drawn to these books because I believe crime reflects the era, the culture, the mores of its time and place, and because I live in hope that we can get to that redemption that spans those boundaries, that rearranges molecules.
In the troubled and troubling summer of 2020, a time that will live in infamy, I am seeking out writers of color. I need to learn. I need to be open to perspectives that can rearrange my molecules.
A lot of people are doing that, and it has to be good. White Americans are being called to account for the crimes of our dominant culture and we have a chance to both be humbled and to rise. This will play out in the streets, at the ballot box, and in libraries. When one of us takes a quiet moment with a book and emerges from its spell a better person, storytelling proves its value.
For myself, I’m putting together a list of Black mystery writers. I know they will transport me as fully in their worlds as Agatha Christie transported the teenaged me to small English villages. I google and find a long and rich body of work. Walter Mosely deserves to be read and reread. I know he has brothers in the genre, and I’ll get there. The women have called me recently, though. I’ve read Attica Locke’s books as they come out and await the next one. I revisited Barbara Neeley’s brilliant Blanche books. From there, I’m working my list. I have just read If I Should Die, the first of Grace F. Edwards’s series, set in Harlem, and will download the others soon. I wish Neeley and Taylor were still with us.
Locke, Neely, and Edwards immerse their readers fully in place and time. The range of their characters is broad and deep. There’s food. There’s music. The food and music long ago slipped into—or were co-opted—by the dominant culture because they are so good.
But when Grace F. Edwards drops me in Harlem with David Dinkins the mayor of New York, when the main character, Mali Anderson, takes me to the jazz club where her father plays piano, when she takes me to Majestics for fish and chips, I’m the one who slips into a different world. There, Black culture is the dominant culture. Taylor does not identify her characters by race. Mali is a former police officer because she punched a colleague named Terry Keenan. Why? Because he was a jerk who needed punching. Does it matter if the man with an Irish name is white or Black?
Mali can’t give up trying to right wrongs or punching people who need it. Readers cheer.
Neeley and Edwards’s books predate Black Lives Matter, as do some of Locke’s, and they demonstrate beyond doubt that Black lives matter. Their stories blend time, place, heartbreak, and redemption for their characters.
It’s not the writer’s job to redeem readers. It’s the reader’s job to find her own. I’m grateful to have a long and growing list of mysteries by African American women that, through time, space, and storytelling, offer me a path.
More Black mystery writers on my growing list of rearrangers of molecule:
Eleanor Taylor Bland
Winners of the Eleanor Taylor Bland award winners
Rachel Howzell Hall
Tyora Moody
Send your recommendations to nora@noragaskin.com.
From the Oddities File
I wrote the essay below in the spring of 2013, when Steve and I were planning our first trip to Paris. Now it is the spring of 2020 and we just canceled plans for our third trip to Paris. Damned virus.
I am working on two pieces of writing today, another short essay for this space and a scene in my next novel. Writers at work excel at finding rabbit holes to dive down, so it’s the perfect time to browse through my computer files, to see what’s there that I’ve forgotten. I keep a folder called “Prose and Other Oddities.” Look what I found. It seems to bring me full circle, from eager traveler to reluctant homebody. (Nora, April 29, 2020)
Vivian, Audrey, and I Will Always Have Paris
It started when I went into Flyleaf Books to hear a reading. I went early because I meant to browse. Meant to, but something drew me past all the other tables and all the other books until I beheld Le Road Trip.
Aha. My kind of French. I picked it up and flipped some pages. I found a photo of the author, Vivian Swift, at age 19. Put it side-by-side with a picture of me at 19 and we could be sisters. Or the same person.
Now I know that when Vivian was 19, in 1975, I was 24. So she’s younger than I. From her picture on the back flyleaf, I judge she’s also taller. Her formerly short, wavy, dark hair is now long and fair and straight. And she looks so at home there in France wearing chic slacks, a sweater and elegant flats with bows on the toes. So we’re not quite the same person but she knows things I want to know.
Things like, ticket agents in train stations in France will lie to you. They will deny that a train listed in the schedule exists. Or they will tell you yes, that train leaves from the far platform at two o’clock, but neglect to say, “It doesn’t run on Sundays.”
Steve and I are planning a trip to Paris in June 2013, so I bought Le Road Trip to add to our collection of guidebooks and maps.
Once we decided on this trip, my immediate concern was what shall I wear? I want to look Parisian. I want to be that woman who throws on this and that and adds a scarf and…can I be reborn as Audrey Hepburn? And can I do it by next June?
Until I found Vivian, I was embarrassed by my concerns with appearance, but Vivian understands. She gives me courage to own my foolishness.
I wonder if she knows you can Google “what to wear in Paris” and find multiple sites. I’d already done that before I found her and her book. Paris Escapes advises black and neutrals, no sweats or hoodies, no flipflops, good walking shoes but not, not, not white athletic shoes. Minimal makeup is fine. Scarves and accessories are essential.
I am happy with all that. I can do all that, and I’m especially glad to receive the white athletic shoe rule. After all, what I really want is to avoid looking like what I will be: An American tourist.
Besides, Paris Escapes tells me, better dressed people get better service. And those white athletic shoes tip off all the pickpockets and other evil doers that you are a tourist/sucker/mark. If I see you coming and you are wearing white athletic shoes, I’m putting on my sunglasses, tying my elegant scarf over my head, and running the other way. Just as Audrey would do.
When Vivian writes about the correct clothing, she advises much the same, confirming that Paris Escapes is reliable. That makes me happy. She has even taught me the word for what I want to be. A flaneur, a person who has mastered the art of nonchalance.
Then Vivian breaks my heart: “You are not Parisian and you never will be.” Dang. After the initial twinge, I see that she’s just set me free. “You might as well be yourself,” she says.
Much of Le Road Trip has to do with Vivian’s honeymoon. She’s just married James and they are off on an adventure. She writes us through all the stages of a relationship and how they parallel the stages of a trip. The big ups, the big downs, the sadness of coming to the end of the trip (but not the end of the marriage!) And what the heck to do with those last few hours before you have to head for the airport?
When Steve and I were in college, we walked together all the time. He is six inches taller than I am, and I swear all of that height difference is in his legs. He’s from up north, too, you know, and those people just move faster. So I learned to speed up, maybe stretch my stride a bit, and he learned to slow down and shorten his steps and we walked together everywhere, hand-in-hand.
Over the years, we’ve lost that ability. He’s always out ahead of me now. (If he’s wearing white athletic shoes in Paris, that’ll be OK with me.) But he’s a romantic and I’m sure that for strolling by the Seine, we’ll find our old rhythm.
Vivian reinforces the idea that a couple doesn’t have to be in perfect step all the time. She often stopped for a cup of tea while James went in search of a historic site or a soccer game. Steve and I figured this out a long time ago. I have a picture of me sitting on a rock on the rim of the Grand Canyon. While Steve was heading down Bright Angel Trail, I was contemplating the plot of a novel I may yet write.
There are limits to the ways Vivian and I are alike. Besides taller, younger, blonder, she is very, very well-traveled. That picture of her at nineteen, taken in 1974, could be a passport photo. She was about to head to France for the very first time. In our parallel universes, I was twenty-four that year. I was already two years married and halfway through a Masters degree. I was also in the middle of the only two years of my life I didn’t live within ten miles of the house I grew up in.
That and she’s a cat person.
All in all, I will be so much better a traveler for having Vivian to show me how it’s done.
She has another book in print, one published way back in 2008. I plan to read it on the airplane to Paris. Title: When Wanderers Cease to Roam, A Traveler’s Journal of Staying Put.
Reading in the Time of Trump
Spring 2016: Donald Trump cut a swath through a field of Republican cornstalks. He reaped and he harvested. I read Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Persuasion.
June 2016: A Trump-shaped cloud threatened to block the sun. I read Emma.
July 2016: Donald Trump became the Republican candidate for president. I read Middlemarch, under my bedcovers.
November 2016: The day after the election, I stayed in bed and read Sense and Sensibility.
It was clear to me. Only storytelling could tell me which way sanity lies. I turned to Dickens. Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorritt got me well into 2017.
I bought a set of 350 British mysteries, copyright free, the unknowns and forgottens, bundled by Amazon. Noir by women writers, Patricia Highsmith and Margaret Millar. Psychological suspense, Ruth Rendell, Shirley Jackson.
In 2018, Jane Eyre. I wished I’d left it to my teen-aged romanticism.
I ventured looks in other directions from time-to-time. I read Growing Up Trump. I learned that it’s as bad as you think to grow up Trump, but I could not look away. Eric is the smart one. Surprise.
I read about Patty Hearst, American Heiress, and was reminded that the late sixties, early seventies were a really awful time. It was good to remember things have in fact been worse and in my Baby Boomer lifetime. Really.
That reminded me of the other great cloud that always shades the light of America and dims the shining city’s glow, the cloud that will remain when the baby blimp has exploded and dissolved. I read The Underground Railroad; Kindred; The Blood of Emmitt Till; There, There; Killers of the Flower Moon. Barbara Neely’s Blanche books. It is white privilege to wring our hands during the Current Unpleasantness. There are greater unpleasantnesses. They morph but do not go away. For some of us, a change in the presidency and reversal of policies by executive will fix a lot of things. For some of us, the new boss will be a lot like the old boss. Perspective.
I discovered my new favorite writer, Jane Gardem. Her Old Filth Trilogy spanned the holiday months, 2017 into 2018. Another trilogy, another Jane: Jane Smiley, The Last Hundred Years.
I read, again, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, then Flavia de Luce’s most recent adventure.
In the summer of 2019, I returned to the House of Niccolo, eight books in a series set in the 1400s, and read them as one very long and well-spun yarn. The hero is an anti-hero, brilliant, swashbuckling, ruthless and kind, with near magical powers. I am in love with him. I finished the last word in March 2020. With Hilary Mantel’s third in her trilogy due, I’m reading again about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, Wolf Hall, to be followed immediately by Bring Up the Dead and then the plunge into The Mirror and the Light. My form of total immersion.
March 2020, the plague period of The Time of Trump. A good time to be a reader because I never have to wonder how I’ll get through my time in isolation. It won’t even be isolation. And if this plague gets long drawn-out, I have my eye on a work of historical fiction that spans 2,000 years. I hope it’s 2,000 pages.
Do I see patterns as I think back on what I’ve read? Austen, Eliot, and Dickens wrote about the times they lived in. Novels of manners, social commentary both gentle and sharp. I read them to escape the 21st Century and at the same time to see it mirrored, to ponder what has changed and what has not. We know their people as well as we know the people we pass on the street and in the grocery store, the people we eavesdrop on when we sit alone in a coffee shop, or who eavesdrop on us.
I read my share of contemporary novels of manners in the last four years. I find mystery, suspense, and true crime come closest to Austen and Dickens. They focus on the here, the now, the hows and the whys. Especially the whys. Always the right question. I have found better answers in my backwards looks.
I hold two things sacred: What’s best in human nature, and storytelling. The Italians sing to each other from their balconies. Kindnesses happen everywhere, untold, but felt. People write novels so human beings can huddle together in the shared warmth of storytelling. Even in The Time of Trump.
I believe that in March 2020, we are seeing that time come to an ugly and drawn-out end. I never imagined how sad I’d be as that happens. And I could be wrong. Maybe we are about to re-up.
I look ahead. I plan to return to Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities seems right. Mantel’s book about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. Toni Morrison. War and Peace.
You know what I don’t know yet? What will my reading be after The Time of Trump? Comedies and romances? Books that haven’t been written yet? My Kindle and I are waiting.
